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Enter the Bush Doctrine

The four pillars of the president's strategy for winning World War IV.

By

Norman Podhoretz

Updated Sept. 2, 2004 11:59 p.m. ET

(Editor's note: This is excerpted from Mr. Podhoretz's article, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," which appears in the September issue of Commentary.)

In "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947), the theoretical defense he constructed of the strategy President Truman adopted for fighting the war ahead, George F. Kennan (then the director of the State Department's policy planning staff, and writing under the pseudonym "X") described that strategy as "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies . . . by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points."

In other words (though Mr. Kennan himself did not use those words), we were faced with the prospect of nothing less than another world war; and (though in later years, against the plain sense of the words that he himself did use, he tried to claim that the "counterforce" he had in mind was not military) it would not be an entirely "cold" one, either. Before it was over, more than 100,000 Americans would die on the far-off battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, and the blood of many others allied with us in the political and ideological struggle against the Soviet Union would be spilled on those same battlefields, and in many other places as well.

For these reasons, I agree with one of our leading contemporary students of military strategy, Eliot A. Cohen, who thinks that what is generally called the "Cold War" (a term, incidentally, coined by Soviet propagandists) should be given a new name. "The Cold War," Mr. Cohen writes, was actually "World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map." I also agree that the nature of the conflict in which we are now engaged can only be fully appreciated if we look upon it as World War IV. To justify giving it this name--rather than, say, the "war on terrorism"--Mr. Cohen lists "some key features" that it shares with World War III:

that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.

There is one more feature that World War IV shares with World War III and that Mr. Cohen does not mention: Both were declared through the enunciation of a presidential doctrine.

The Truman Doctrine of 1947 was born with the announcement that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." Beginning with a special program of aid to Greece and Turkey, which were then threatened by communist takeovers, the strategy was broadened within a few months by the launching of a much larger and more significant program of economic aid that came to be called the Marshall Plan. The purpose of the Marshall Plan was to hasten the reconstruction of the war-torn economies of Western Europe: not only because this was a good thing in itself, and not only because it would serve American interests, but also because it could help eliminate the grievances on which communism fed.

But then came a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Following as it had upon the installation by the Soviet Union of puppet regimes in the occupied countries of East Europe, the Czech coup demonstrated that economic measures would not be enough by themselves to ward off a comparable danger posed to Italy and France by huge local Communist Parties entirely subservient to Moscow. Out of this realization--and out of a parallel worry about an actual Soviet invasion of Western Europe--there emerged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Containment, then, was a three-sided strategy made up of economic, political and military components. All three would be deployed in a shifting relative balance over the four decades it took to win World War III.

If the Truman Doctrine unfolded gradually, revealing its entire meaning only in stages, the Bush Doctrine was pretty fully enunciated in a single speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001. It was then clarified and elaborated in three subsequent statements: President Bush's first State of the Union address, on Jan. 29, 2002; his speech to the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 1, 2002; and the remarks on the Middle East he delivered three weeks later, on June 24. This difference aside, his contemporaries were at least as startled as Truman's had been, both by the substance of the new doctrine and by the transformation it bespoke in its author. For here was George W. Bush, who in foreign affairs had been a more or less passive disciple of his father, talking for all the world like a fiery follower of Ronald Reagan.

In sharp contrast to Reagan, generally considered a dangerous ideologue, the first President Bush was often accused of being deficient in what he himself inelegantly dismissed as "the vision thing." The charge was fair in that the elder Mr. Bush had no guiding sense of what role the United States might play in reshaping the post-Cold War world. A strong adherent of the "realist" perspective on world affairs, he believed that the maintenance of stability was the proper purpose of American foreign policy, and the only wise and prudential course to follow. Therefore, when Saddam Hussein upset the balance of power in the Middle East by invading Kuwait in 1990, the elder Mr. Bush went to war not to create a new configuration in the region but to restore the status quo ante. And it was precisely out of the same overriding concern for stability that, having achieved this objective by driving Saddam out of Kuwait, Mr. Bush then allowed him to remain in power.

As for the second President Bush, before 9/11 he was, to all appearances, as deficient in the "vision thing" as his father before him. If he entertained any doubts about the soundness of the "realist" approach, he showed no sign of it. Nothing he said or did gave any indication that he might be dissatisfied with the idea that his main job in foreign affairs was to keep things on an even keel. Nor was there any visible indication that he might be drawn to Ronald Reagan's more "idealistic" ambition to change the world, especially with the "Wilsonian" aim of making it "safe for democracy" by encouraging the spread to as many other countries as possible of the liberties we Americans enjoyed.

Which is why Mr. Bush's address of Sept. 20, 2001, came as so great a surprise. Delivered only nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and officially declaring that the United States was now at war, the Sept. 20 speech put this nation, and all others, on notice that whether or not George W. Bush had been a strictly conventional realist in the mold of his father, he was now politically born again as a passionate democratic idealist of the Reaganite stamp.

It was also this speech that marked the emergence of the Bush Doctrine, and that pointed just as clearly to World War IV as the Truman Doctrine had to War World III. Mr. Bush did not explicitly give the name World War IV to the struggle ahead, but he did characterize it as a direct successor to the two world wars that had immediately preceded it. Thus, of the "global terrorist network" that had attacked us on our own soil, he said:

We have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

As this passage, coming toward the beginning of the speech, linked the Bush Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine and to the great struggle led by Franklin D. Roosevelt before it, the windup section demonstrated that if the second President Bush had previously lacked "the vision thing," his eyes were blazing with it now. "Great harm has been done to us," he intoned toward the end. "We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment." Then he went on to spell out the substance of that mission and that moment:

The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

Finally, in his peroration, drawing on some of the same language he had been applying to the nation as a whole, Mr. Bush shifted into the first person, pledging his own commitment to the great mission we were all charged with accomplishing:

I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Not even Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator" himself, had ever been so eloquent in expressing the "idealistic" impetus behind his conception of the American role in the world.

This was not the last time Mr. Bush would sound these themes. Two-and-a-half years later, at a moment when things seemed to be going badly in the war, it was with the same ideas he had originally put forward on Sept. 20, 2001, that he sought to reassure the nation. The occasion would be a commencement address at the Air Force Academy on June 2, 2004, where he would repeatedly place the "war against terrorism" in direct succession to World War II and World War III. He would also be unusually undiplomatic in making no bones about his rejection of realism:

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

And again, even less diplomatically:

Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

To top it all off, he would go out of his way to assert that his own policy, which he properly justified in the first place as a better way to protect American interests than the alternative favored by the realists, also bore the stamp of the Reaganite version of Wilsonian idealism:

This conflict will take many turns, with setbacks on the course to victory. Through it all, our confidence comes from one unshakable belief: We believe in Ronald Reagan's words that "the future belongs to the free."

The First Pillar

The first pillar of the Bush Doctrine, then, was built on a repudiation of moral relativism and an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs. And just to make sure that the point he had first made on Sept. 20, 2001, had hit home, Mr. Bush returned to it even more outspokenly and in greater detail in the State of the Union address of Jan. 29, 2002.

Mr. Bush had won enthusiastic plaudits from many for the "moral clarity" of his Sept. 20 speech, but he had also provoked even greater dismay and disgust among "advanced" thinkers and "sophisticated" commentators and diplomats both at home and abroad. Now he intensified and exacerbated their outrage by becoming more specific. Having spoken in September only in general terms about the enemy in World War IV, Mr. Bush proceeded in his second major wartime pronouncement to single out three such nations--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--which he described as forming an "axis of evil."

Here again he was following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet Union, our principal enemy in World War III, as an "evil empire," and who had been answered with a veritably hysterical outcry from chancelleries and campuses and editorial pages all over the world. Evil? What place did a word like that have in the lexicon of international affairs, assuming it would ever occur to an enlightened person to exhume it from the grave of obsolete concepts in any connection whatsoever? But in the eyes of the "experts," Reagan was not an enlightened person. Instead, he was a "cowboy," a B-movie actor, who had by some freak of democratic perversity landed in the White House. In denouncing the Soviet empire, he was accused either of signaling an intention to trigger a nuclear war or of being too stupid to understand that his wildly provocative rhetoric might do so inadvertently.

The reaction to Mr. Bush was perhaps less hysterical and more scornful than the outcry against Reagan, since this time there was no carrying on about a nuclear war. But the air was just as thick with the old sneers and jeers. Who but an ignoramus and a simpleton--or a fanatical religious fundamentalist, of the very type on whom Mr. Bush was declaring war--would resort to archaic moral absolutes like "good" and "evil"? On the one hand, it was egregiously simpleminded to brand a whole nation as evil, and on the other, only a fool could bring himself to believe, as Mr. Bush (once more like Reagan) had evidently done in complete and ingenuous sincerity, that the United States, of all countries, represented the good. Surely only a know-nothing illiterate could be oblivious of the innumerable crimes committed by America both at home and abroad--crimes that the country's own leading intellectuals had so richly documented in the by-now standard academic view of its history.

Here is how Gore Vidal, one of those intellectuals, stated the case:

I mean, to watch Bush doing his little war dance in Congress . . . about "evildoers" and this "axis of evil." . . . I thought, he doesn't even know what the word axis means. Somebody just gave it to him. . . . This is about as mindless a statement as you could make. Then he comes up with about a dozen other countries that have "evil" people in them, who might commit "terrorist acts." What is a terrorist act? Whatever he thinks is a terrorist act. And we are going to go after them. Because we are good and they are evil. And we're "gonna git 'em."

This was rougher and cruder than the language issuing from editorial pages and think tanks and foreign ministries and even most other intellectuals, but it was no different from what nearly all of them thought and how many of them talked in private.

As soon became clear, however, Mr. Bush was not deterred. In subsequent statements he continued to uphold the first pillar of his new doctrine and to affirm the universality of the moral purposes animating this new war:

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. . . . We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.

Then, in a fascinating leap into the great theoretical debate of the post-Cold War era (though without identifying the main participants), Mr. Bush came down squarely on the side of Francis Fukuyama's much-misunderstood view of "the end of history," according to which the demise of communism had eliminated the only serious competitor to our own political system:

The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.

Having endorsed Fukuyama, Mr. Bush now brushed off the political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose rival theory postulated a "clash of civilizations" arising from the supposedly incompatible values prevailing in different parts of the world:

When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes.

The Second Pillar

If the first of the four pillars on which the Bush Doctrine stood was a new moral attitude, the second was an equally dramatic shift in the conception of terrorism as it had come to be defined in standard academic and intellectual discourse.

Under this new understanding--confirmed over and over again by the fact that most of the terrorists about whom we were learning came from prosperous families--terrorism was no longer considered a product of economic factors. The "swamps" in which this murderous plague bred were swamps not of poverty and hunger but of political oppression. It was only by "draining" them, through a strategy of "regime change," that we would be making ourselves safe from the threat of terrorism and simultaneously giving the peoples of "the entire Islamic world" the freedoms "they want and deserve."

In the new understanding, furthermore, terrorists, with rare exceptions, were not individual psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various governments. Our aim, therefore, could not be merely to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out the al Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership. Mr. Bush vowed that we would also uproot and destroy the entire network of interconnected terrorist organizations and cells "with global reach" that existed in as many as 50 or 60 countries. No longer would we treat the members of these groups as criminals to be arrested by the police, read their Miranda rights and brought to trial. From now on, they were to be regarded as the irregular troops of a military alliance at war with the United States, and indeed the civilized world as a whole.

Not that this analysis of terrorism had exactly been a secret. The State Department itself had a list of seven state sponsors of terrorism (all but two of which, Cuba and North Korea, were predominantly Muslim), and it regularly issued reports on terrorist incidents throughout the world. But aside from such things as the lobbing of a cruise missile or two, diplomatic and economic sanctions that were inconsistently and even perfunctorily enforced, and a number of covert operations, the law-enforcement approach still prevailed.

September 11 changed much--if not yet all--of that; still in use were atavistic phrases like "bringing the terrorists to justice." But no one could any longer dream that the American answer to what had been done to us in New York and Washington would begin with an FBI investigation and end with a series of ordinary criminal trials. War had been declared on the United States, and to war we were going to go.

But against whom? Since it was certain that Osama bin Laden had masterminded September 11, and since he and the top leadership of al Qaeda were holed up in Afghanistan, the first target, and thus the first testing ground of this second pillar of the Bush Doctrine, chose itself.

Before resorting to military force, however, Mr. Bush issued an ultimatum to the extreme Islamic radicals of the Taliban who were then ruling Afghanistan. The ultimatum demanded that they turn Osama bin Laden and his people over to us and that they shut down all terrorist training camps there. By rejecting this ultimatum, the Taliban not only asked for an invasion but, under the Bush Doctrine, also asked to be overthrown. And so, on Oct. 7, 2001, the United States--joined by Britain and about a dozen other countries--launched a military campaign against both al Qaeda and the regime that was providing it with "aid and safe haven."

As compared with what would come later, there was relatively little opposition either at home or abroad to the opening of this first front of World War IV. The reason was that the Afghan campaign could easily be justified as a retaliatory strike against the terrorists who had attacked us. And while there was a good deal of murmuring about the dangers of pursuing a policy of "regime change," there was very little sympathy in practice (outside the Muslim world, that is) for the Taliban.

Whatever opposition was mounted to the battle of Afghanistan mainly took the form of skepticism over the chances of winning it. True, such skepticism was in some quarters a mask for outright opposition to American military power in general. But once the Afghan campaign got under way, the main focus shifted to everything that seemed to be going awry on the battlefield.

For example, only a couple of weeks into the campaign, when there were missteps involving the use of the Afghan fighters of the Northern Alliance, observers like R.W. Apple of the New York Times immediately rushed to conjure up the ghost of Vietnam. This restless spirit, having been called forth from the vasty deep, henceforth refused to be exorcised, and would go on to elbow its way into every detail of the debates over all the early battles of World War IV. On this occasion, its message was that we were falling victim to the illusion that we could rely on an incompetent local force to do the fighting on the ground while we supplied advice and air support. This strategy would inevitably fail, and would suck us into the same "quagmire" into which we had been dragged in Vietnam. After all, as Mr. Apple and others argued, the Soviet Union had suffered its own "Vietnam" in Afghanistan--and unlike us, it had not been hampered by the logistical problems of projecting power over a great distance. How could we expect to do better?

When, however, the B-52s and the 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter" bombs were unleashed, they temporarily banished the ghost of Vietnam and undercut the fears of some and the hopes of others that we were heading into a quagmire. Far from being good for nothing but "pounding the rubble," as the critics had sarcastically charged, the Daisy Cutters exerted, as even a New York Times report was forced to concede, "a terrifying psychological impact as they exploded just above ground, wiping out everything for hundreds of yards."

But the Daisy Cutters were only the half of it. As we were all to discover, our "smart bomb" technology had advanced far beyond the stage it had reached when first introduced in 1991. In Afghanistan in 2001, such bombs--guided by "spotters" on the ground equipped with radios, laptops and lasers and often riding on horseback, and also aided by unmanned satellite drones and other systems in the air--were both incredibly precise in avoiding civilian casualties and absolutely lethal in destroying the enemy. It was this "new kind of American power," added the New York Times report, that "enabled a ragtag opposition" (i.e., the same Northern Alliance supposedly dragging us into a quagmire) to rout the "battle-hardened troops" of the Taliban regime in less than three months, and with the loss of very few American troops.

In the event, Osama bin Laden was not captured and al Qaeda was not totally destroyed. But it was certainly damaged by the campaign in Afghanistan. As for the Taliban regime, it was overthrown and replaced by a government that would no longer give aid and comfort to terrorists. Moreover, while Afghanistan under the new government may not have been exactly democratic, it was infinitely less oppressive than its totalitarian predecessor. And thanks to the clearing of political ground that had been covered over by the radical Islamic extremism of the Taliban, the seeds of free institutions were being sown and given a fighting chance to sprout and grow.

The campaign in Afghanistan demonstrated in the most unmistakable terms what followed from the new understanding of terrorism that formed the second pillar of the Bush Doctrine: Countries that gave safe haven to terrorists and refused to clean them out were asking the United States to do it for them, and the regimes ruling these countries were also asking to be overthrown in favor of new leaders with democratic aspirations. Of course, as circumstances permitted and prudence dictated, other instruments of power, whether economic or diplomatic, would be deployed. But Afghanistan showed that the military option was open, available for use, and lethally effective.

The Third Pillar

The third pillar on which the Bush Doctrine rested was the assertion of our right to pre-empt. Mr. Bush had already pretty clearly indicated on Sept. 20, 2001, that he had no intention of waiting around to be attacked again ("We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism"). But in the State of the Union speech in January 2002, he became much more explicit on this point too:

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

To those with ears to hear, the January speech should have made it abundantly clear that Mr. Bush was now proposing to go beyond the fundamentally retaliatory strike against Afghanistan and to take pre-emptive action. Yet at first it went largely unnoticed that this right to strike, not in retaliation for but in anticipation of an attack, was a logical extension of the general outline Mr. Bush had provided on September 20. Nor did the new position attract much attention even when it was reiterated in the plainest of words on January 29. It was not until the third in the series of major speeches elaborating the Bush Doctrine--the one delivered on June 1, 2002, at West Point to the graduating class of newly commissioned officers of the United States Army--that the message got through at last.

Perhaps the reason the pre-emption pillar finally became clearly visible at West Point was that, for the first time, Mr. Bush placed his new ideas in historical context:

For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence--the promise of massive retaliation against nations--means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend.

This covered al Qaeda and similar groups. But Mr. Bush then proceeded to explain, in addition, why the old doctrines could not work with a regime like Saddam Hussein's in Iraq:

Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.

Refusing to flinch from the implications of this analysis, Mr. Bush repudiated the previously sacred dogmas of arms control and treaties against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a means of dealing with the dangers now facing us from Iraq and other members of the axis of evil:

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically break them.

Hence, Mr. Bush inexorably continued:

If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.

At this early stage, the Bush administration was still denying that it had reached any definite decision about Saddam Hussein; but everyone knew that, in promising to act, Mr. Bush was talking about him. The immediate purpose was to topple the Iraqi dictator before he had a chance to supply weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists. But this was by no means the only or--surprising though it would seem in retrospect--even the decisive consideration, either for Mr. Bush or his supporters (or, for that matter, his opponents). And in any case, the long-range strategic rationale went beyond the proximate causes of the invasion. Mr. Bush's idea was to extend the enterprise of "draining the swamps" begun in Afghanistan and then to set the entire region on a course toward democratization. For if Afghanistan under the Taliban represented the religious face of Middle Eastern terrorism, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was its most powerful secular partner. It was to deal with this two-headed beast that a two-pronged strategy was designed.

Unlike the plan to go after Afghanistan, however, the idea of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein provoked a firestorm hardly less intense than the one that was still raging over Mr. Bush's insistence on using the words "good" and "evil."

Even before the debate on Iraq in particular, there had been strong objection to the whole idea of pre-emptive action by the United States. Some maintained that such action would be a violation of international law, while others contended that it would set a dangerous precedent under which, say, Pakistan might attack India or vice-versa. But once the discussion shifted from the Bush Doctrine in general to the question of Iraq, the objections became more specific.

Most of these were brought together in early August 2002 (only about two months after Mr. Bush's speech at West Point) in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "Don't Attack Saddam." The author was Brent Scowcroft, who had been National Security Adviser to the elder President Bush. Mr. Scowcroft asserted, first, that there was

scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks. Indeed, Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them.

That being the case, Mr. Scowcroft continued, "an attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken," the campaign that must remain "our preeminent security priority."

But this was not the only "priority" that to Mr. Scowcroft was "pre-eminent":

Possibly the most dire consequences [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Showing little regard for the American "obsession," Mr. Scowcroft was very solicitous of the regional one:

If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict . . . in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us. We would be seen as ignoring a key interest of the Muslim world in order to satisfy what is seen to be a narrow American interest.

This, added Mr. Scowcroft, "could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region," than which, to a quintessential realist like him, nothing could be worse.

In coming out publicly, and in these terms, against the second President Bush's policy, Mr. Scowcroft underscored the extent to which the son had diverged from the father's perspective. In addition, by lending greater credence to the already credible rumor that the elder Mr. Bush opposed invading Iraq, Mr. Scowcroft's article belied what would soon become one of the favorite theories of the hard left--namely, that the son had gone to war in order to avenge the attempted assassination of his father.

On the other hand, by implicitly assenting to the notion that toppling Saddam was merely "a narrow American interest," Mr. Scowcroft gave a certain measure of aid and comfort to the hard left and its fellow travelers within the liberal community. For from these circles the cry had been going out that it was the corporations, especially Halliburton (which Vice President Dick Cheney had formerly headed) and the oil companies that were dragging us into an unnecessary war.

So, too, with Mr. Scowcroft's emphasis on resolving "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"--a standard euphemism for putting pressure on Israel, whose "intransigence" was taken to be the major obstacle to peace. By strongly insinuating that the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was a greater threat to us than Saddam Hussein, Mr. Scowcroft provided a respectable rationale for the hostility toward Israel that had come shamelessly out of the closet within hours of the attacks of 9/11 and that had been growing more and more overt, more and more virulent, and more and more widespread ever since. To the "paleoconservative" right, where the charge first surfaced, it was less the oil companies than Israel that was mainly dragging us into invading Iraq. Before long, the left would add the same accusation to its own indictment, and in due course it would be imprinted more and more openly on large swatches of mainstream opinion.

A cognate count in this indictment held that the invasion of Iraq had been secretly engineered by a cabal of Jewish officials acting not in the interest of their own country but in the service of Israel, and more particularly of Ariel Sharon. At first the framers and early spreaders of this defamatory charge considered it the better part of prudence to identify the conspirators not as Jews but as "neoconservatives." It was a clever tactic, in that Jews did in fact constitute a large proportion of the repentant liberals and leftists who, having some two or three decades earlier broken ranks with the left and moved rightward, came to be identified as neoconservatives. Everyone in the know knew this, and for those to whom it was news, the point could easily be gotten across by singling out only those neoconservatives who had Jewish-sounding names and to ignore the many other leading members of the group whose clearly non-Jewish names might confuse the picture.

This tactic had been given a trial run by Patrick J. Buchanan in opposing the first Gulf War of 1991. Buchanan had then already denounced the Johnny-come-lately neoconservatives for having hijacked and corrupted the conservative movement, but now he descended deeper into the fever swamps by insisting that there were "only two groups beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East--the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States." Among those standing in the "amen corner" he subsequently singled out four prominent hawks with Jewish-sounding names, counterposing them to "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown" who would actually do the fighting if these Jews had their way.

Ten years later, in 2001, in the writings of Mr. Buchanan and other paleoconservatives within the journalistic fraternity (notably Robert Novak, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Paul Craig Roberts), one of the four hawks of 1991, Richard Perle, made a return appearance. But Mr. Perle was now joined in starring roles by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, both occupying high positions in the Pentagon, and a large supporting cast of identifiably Jewish intellectuals and commentators outside the government (among them Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan). Like their predecessors in 1990-91, the members of the new ensemble were portrayed as agents of their bellicose counterparts in the Israeli government. But there was also a difference: The new group had managed to infiltrate the upper reaches of the American government. Having pulled this off, they had conspired to manipulate their non-Jewish bosses--Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush himself--into invading Iraq.

Before long, this theory was picked up and circulated by just about everyone in the whole world who was intent on discrediting the Bush Doctrine. And understandably so, for what could suit their purposes better than to "expose" the invasion of Iraq--and by extension the whole of World War IV--as a war started by Jews and being waged solely in the interest of Israel?

To protect themselves against the taint of anti-Semitism, purveyors of this theory sometimes disingenuously continued to pretend that when they said "neoconservative" they did not mean "Jew." Yet the theory inescapably rested on all-too-familiar anti-Semitic canards--principally that Jews were never reliably loyal to the country in which they lived, and that they were always conspiring behind the scenes, often successfully, to manipulate the world for their own nefarious purposes.

Quite apart from its pernicious moral and political implications, the theory was ridiculous in its own right. To begin with, it asked one to believe the unbelievable: that strong-minded people like Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice could be fooled by a bunch of cunning subordinates, whether Jewish or not, into doing anything at all against their better judgment, let alone something so momentous as waging a war, let alone a war in which they could detect no clear relation to American interests.

In the second place, there was the evidence uncovered by the purveyors of this theory themselves. That evidence, to which they triumphantly pointed, consisted of published articles and statements in which the alleged conspirators openly and unambiguously advocated the very policies they now stood accused of having secretly foisted upon an unwary Bush administration. Nor had these allegedly secret conspirators ever concealed their belief that toppling Saddam Hussein and adopting a policy aimed at the democratization of the entire Middle East would be good not only for the United States and for the people of the region but also for Israel. (And what, an uncharacteristically puzzled Richard Perle asked a hostile interviewer, was wrong with that?)

Which brings us to the fourth pillar on which the Bush Doctrine was erected.

The Fourth Pillar

Listening to the laments of Mr. Scowcroft and many others, one would think that George W. Bush had been ignoring "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" altogether in his misplaced "obsession" with Iraq. In fact, however, even before 9/11 it had been widely and authoritatively reported that Mr. Bush was planning to come out publicly in favor of establishing a Palestinian state as the only path to a peaceful resolution of the conflict; and in October, after a short delay caused by 9/11, he became the first American president actually to do so. Yet at some point in the evolution of his thinking over the months that followed, Mr. Bush seems to have realized that there was something bizarre about supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state that would be run by a terrorist like Yasser Arafat and his henchmen. Why should the United States acquiesce, let alone help, in adding yet another state to those harboring and sponsoring terrorism precisely at a time when we were at war to rid the world of just such regimes?

Presumably it was under the prodding of this question that Mr. Bush came up with an idea even more novel in its way than the new conception of terrorism he had developed after 9/11. This idea was broached only three weeks after his speech at West Point, on June 24, 2002, when he issued a statement adding conditions to his endorsement of a Palestinian state:

Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.

But engaging in such a fight, he added, required the election of "new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," who would embark on building "entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics, and action against terrorism."

It was with these words that Mr. Bush brought his "vision" (as he kept calling it) of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel into line with his overall perspective on the evil of terrorism. And having traveled that far, he went the distance by repositioning the Palestinian issue into the larger context from which Arab propaganda had ripped it. Since this move passed almost unnoticed, it is worth dwelling on why it was so important.

Even before Israel was born in 1948, the Muslim countries of the Middle East had been fighting against the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state--any Jewish state--on land they believed Allah had reserved for those faithful to his prophet Mohammad. Hence the Arab-Israeli conflict had pitted hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims, in control of more than two dozen countries and vast stretches of territory, against a handful of Jews who then numbered well under three-quarters of a million and who lived on a tiny sliver of land the size of New Jersey.

But then came the Six Day War of 1967. Launched in an effort to wipe Israel off the map, it ended instead with Israel in control of the West Bank (formerly occupied by Jordan) and Gaza (which had been controlled by Egypt). This humiliating defeat, however, was eventually turned into a rhetorical and political victory by Arab propagandists, who redefined the ongoing war of the whole Muslim world against the Jewish state as, instead, a struggle merely between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Thus was Israel's image transformed from a David to a Goliath, a move that succeeded in alienating much of the old sympathy previously enjoyed by the outnumbered and besieged Jewish state.

Mr. Bush now reversed this reversal. Not only did he reconstruct a truthful framework by telling the Palestinian people that they had been treated for decades "as pawns in the Middle East conflict." He also insisted on being open and forthright about the nations that belonged in this larger picture and about what they had been up to:

I've said in the past that nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media and publicly denounce homicide bombs. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment, and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. Every nation committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. And Syria must choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations.

Here, then, Mr. Bush rebuilt the context in which to understand the Middle East conflict. In the months ahead, pressured by his main European ally, the British prime minister Tony Blair, and by his own secretary of state, Colin Powell, Mr. Bush would sometimes seem to backslide into the old way of thinking. But he would invariably recover. Nor would he ever lose sight of the "vision" by which he was guided on this issue, and through which he had simultaneously made a strong start in fitting not the Palestinian Authority alone but the entire Muslim world, "friends" no less than enemies, into his conception of the war against terrorism.

With the inconsistency thus removed and the resultant shakiness repaired by the addition of this fourth pillar to undergird it, the Bush Doctrine was now firm, coherent and complete.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor at large of Commentary and author, most recently, of "The Norman Podhoretz Reader." In June, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. This is excerpted from his article, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," which appears in the September issue of Commentary.